Search engine’s plans could revolutionize book industry as much as Gutenberg did
The row is a classic clash between the old and the new; between an industry that can trace its roots back to Johannes Gutenberg and other printers of the 15th century and one that has erupted in just half a decade.
Google, the world’s largest Internet search engine company, is to start an on-line book search service in China, accelerating fierce competition with Baidu, its biggest Chinese rival, the Xinhua-run Shanghai Securities News reported.
Invoking the name of Google is enough to spook most media businesses grappling with the impact of the internet but the search giant’s foray into the realm of books has created a firestorm.
The fire was lit over a year ago when Google announced plans to work with five libraries – the New York public library, the Bodleian in Oxford and the libraries of Stanford, Harvard and the University of Michigan – to digitize their books as part of its Print Library project, and make the information gleaned accessible within its online search engine through Google Book Search, already available in test form.
Google’s Book Search programme has two sides. It has co-opted thousands of publishers into its partner programme, which gives Google’s millions of users a chance to discover and then buy books, but it is Google’s library project that has infuriated those same publishers.
Google of late had signed cooperation agreements with four publishing houses in China, including the Tsinghua University Press and the Children’s Publishing House, the newspaper said.
The U.S.-based company will make their books available on-line, provide search links and grant free access to a segment of each work, but readers would have to pay to read the full content, said Kai-fu Lee, vice president of Google.
The publishing industry raised the alarm, claiming the process infringed its most valuable asset, copyright. Nigel Newton, chief executive of Bloomsbury, the publisher of the Harry Potter series, tore into Google, labeling the search engine’s plans as "literary predation". In a speech to mark World Book Day this year, he added that copyright laws were being flouted to provide "window-dressing for a search engine".
The book-publishing industry’s portrayal of Google conjures up images of Guy Montag, the "hero" of Ray Bradbury’s 1950s book-burning masterpiece Fahrenheit 451, gleefully destroying works of literature.
Injunction
Pessimists in the printed world have drawn parallels between Google’s digitization of books and the ending of Britain’s net book agreement in the early 1990s. But just as relaxing restrictions on how books are priced led to a renaissance in reading, as booksellers launched marketing ploys such as "three for two" offers, Google’s attempt to free the knowledge locked in pen and ink could be a revolution for the better.
The French publisher La Martinière and Germany’s WBG took legal action against Google, though the latter’s request for an injunction was thrown out by a Hamburg court last week. In the US, there are two lawsuits pending. "This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law," said Nick Taylor, president of one of the US plaintiffs, the Authors Guild, last September. "It is not up to Google or anyone other than the authors – the rightful owners of these copyrights – to decide whether and how their works will be copied."
The WBG objected to Google’s initiative to scan copyrighted library books and display snippets in search results. Google argues that there’s no copyright infringement, since the snippets shown are no more than what is available in the usual search results. People looking for the whole work are directed to retailers.
Five US publishers – the McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons – launched a separate action on behalf of the Association of American Publishers. Its president, Patricia Schroeder, said: "The bottom line is that under its current plan Google is seeking to make millions of dollars by freeloading on the talent and property of authors and publishers."
The German court indicated that neither the short excerpts nor the scanning of the publisher’s books in the United States infringed on that country’s copyright law, Google said.
Jigsaw
In announcing the decision, Google reiterated its intent to continue its controversial project.
Google, however, feels its intentions have been misrepresented by a publishing industry that is desperately trying to come to terms with the web. Jans Redmer, director of Google Book Search Europe, said:
"Google Book Search is about tapping into an incredible amount of offline content. It is not about putting whole books online; it is not about online reading; it is about book discovery. Ultimately, what we are trying to do is provide links to books in every single Google search request."
Google is passionate about the digitization of books, which we believe benefits everyone by making the world’s knowledge more accessible, David Drummond, senior vice president and general counsel, for the Mountain View, Calif., company said in the company’s blog.
Extending this concept to the internet would mean search engines having to ask permission of the owner of a website before it could be included in an index, making search engines – the "atlases" of the internet – impossible to create.
Baidu, which listed in August 2005 on the U.S. Nasdaq exchange, has signed agreements with prestigious libraries rather than publishing houses in order to establish its on-line book search service.
Baidu has agreements with Peking University Library and the Library of Chinese Academy of Sciences, giving it access to 15 million on-line books, the world’s largest on-line collection of Chinese books, the newspaper reported.
While books that are out of copyright are fully searchable, if a search request brings back information from a book under copyright, access is restricted. Users in the US, which has a "fair use" approach to copyright, get bibliographic data plus a few short sentences or "snippets" related to the search term. European users, however, get no more than the title of the book and its author.
The problem is that to compile the index Google uses for its search engine, it has to scan the entire book. Publishers claim this infringes copyright and want Google to ask permission for each book. The trouble is that only 20% or so of books are in print and because many titles are "orphaned" when publishers go out of business, finding out who to ask for permission could take years.
On-line book searches were unlikely to see immediate profits, but in the long run, the service would attract more clients, said Chen Haiying, an Internet analyst.
Google also plans to take part in production of on-line publications, adding pictures and links, the newspaper said.
Google has claimed that it will permit publishing houses to sell books through search service in the future, and it will take a 30 percent commission from the profit.
Google is also looking at linking book searches with publishers able to print books on demand or allowing publishers to put entire books on the web for free, with the cost met through advertising.